Faculty 2013

 

Our lecturers are hand-picked for their in-depth expertise and ability to convey
their experiences to maximise the learning experience of our delegates. They also
are friendly, approachable, and able to have a good laugh! The intensive, yet
informal, atmosphere at the XML Summer School gives delegates the opportunity to
pick the brains of our expert faculty, both during the classes and afterwards over
a
meal or in the bar.

The Faculty Board operates under the stewardship of Course Director, Dr Lauren Wood.
Each year it decides on the appropriate courses and curriculum and invites the
fantastic array of experts to prepare and deliver classes.

Adam Retter | Alex Milowski | Dr. Andy Seaborne | Blaine Cook | Debbie Lapeyre | Florent Georges | Graham Klyne | Helen Porter | Professor John Chelsom | John Snelson | Kal Ahmed | Dr. Lauren Wood | Liam Quin | Dr. Libby Miller | Matt Patterson | Dr. Michael Kay | Norm Walsh | Peter Flynn | Philip Fennell | Priscilla Walmsley | Robin Wilton | Tomos Hillman | Tony Graham

Faculty Board Members

Debbie Lapeyre

Debbie Lapeyre

Ms. Lapeyre has been working with XML, XSLT, and XPath since their inception and
with SGML (XML’s predecessor) since 1984. Debbie is an architect and developer
of XML Tag Sets (vocabularies) who designs and writes the schemas (DTD, XSD,
RELAX NG) that model those vocabularies. Most recently, she serves as the
architect and as a member of the design team for the NLM Journal Archiving and
Interchange Tag Suite, now the de facto standard for tagging journal articles
worldwide. As a document-oriented publishing analyst, Debbie helps clients to
analyze their information management, retrieval, and distribution/publication
requirements and translates these requirements into functioning production
systems, based on XML technologies. As a senior XSLT and XSL-FO consultant for
Mulberry Technologies, Inc., she
designs both pages and specifications for complex XSLT transforms and
stylesheets as well as develops prototype XSLT applications. Debbie is a member
of the XML Guild. She is also a co-chair of “Balisage: The Markup Conference” and has previously co-chaired
“Extreme Markup Languages”, “Markup Technologies”, and the annual international
“SGML/XML’XX Conference”. She teaches XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, Schematron,
What-is-XML-and-Why-Should-You-Care, and XML print workflows at venues all over
the English-speaking world.

Debbie teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course.

Helen Porter

Helen Porter

Helen Porter is the XML Summer School Coordinator. She takes care of all the
administration for the Summer School, including liaising with the college and
responding to registration queries.

Professor John Chelsom

John Chelsom

John is the XML Summer School Symposiarch. He founded the Summer School with
colleagues from CSW in 2000 and has taught every year since.

John chairs the Hands-On Introduction to XML course and the XML Primer course and teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course and the XML Primer course.

Dr. Lauren Wood

Lauren Wood

Lauren Wood is an independent consultant, with a focus on standards-based
healthcare and XML. She has a long history in working with XML, and before that
SGML, starting with working in the publishing industry. Next, as Director of
Product Technology for SoftQuad, she had significant input into SoftQuad’s
XMetaL XML editor. She chaired the US XML Conference from 2001 to 2005, chaired
the W3C DOM Working Group from its inception to the end of Level 2, and played
an active role in many other OASIS and W3C technical committees, as well as the
Liberty Alliance where she represented Sun Microsystems. Her wide-ranging
experience includes roles as business analyst, technical facilitator,
sanity-checker, and project manager, depending on the needs of the project.

Lauren has been a Faculty member of the Summer School since the beginning. She
occasionally blogs on issues
technical and otherwise.

Lauren chairs the Hands-on Web Publishing course and the Trends and Transients course and teaches in the Hands-on Web Publishing course.

Norm Walsh

Norm Walsh

Norman (Norm) Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he works
with the Application Services team. Norm is also an active participant in a
number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model
Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working
Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee. With almost
twenty years of industry experience, Norm is well known for his work on DocBook
and a wide range of open source projects. He is the author of DocBook: The Definitive Guide.

Norm chairs the Publishing With XML course and teaches in the Hands-on Web Publishing course and the Publishing With XML course.

Peter Flynn

Peter Flynn

Peter Flynn has over 30 years experience in IT and information management. He
currently manages the electronic publishing unit at University College Cork, and
also has his own text management consultancy, Silmaril Consultants, where he works mainly with industrial production
and research systems.

Peter was a member of the W3C’s XML Special Interest Group and a member of the
IETF’s Working Group on HTML. He is maintainer of the XML FAQ and author of The World-Wide Web
Handbook (ITCP, 1995) and Understanding SGML and XML Tools (Kluwer, 1998). He
has recently been researching the usability of editors for structured documents.

In what’s left of his time he likes to cook, surf, read, and listen to early
music.

Peter chairs the Semantic Technologies course and teaches in the Hands-on Web Publishing course.

Priscilla Walmsley

Priscilla Walmsley

Priscilla Walmsley is a senior consultant and managing director at Datypic,
specializing in XML architecture and implementation. She is an expert in XML
core technologies (XQuery, XSLT, XML Schema), content management and
service-oriented architectures.

Priscilla was a member of the W3C XML Schema Working Group from 1999 to 2004,
where she served as an Invited Expert. She is the author of Definitive XML Schema
(Prentice Hall PTR, 2001), and XQuery (O’Reilly Media, 2007). In addition, she co-authored Web Service Contract
Design and Versioning for SOA
(Prentice Hall 2008).

Priscilla chairs the XSLT and XQuery course and teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Faculty Members

Adam Retter

Adam Retter

Adam Retter is both an independent consultant and a co-founder of eXist Solutions GmbH. Adam has
been working with XML technologies and contributing to eXist since 2005. He has almost 15 years
of experience in building Web Applications and Distributed Application
Architectures. Adam has worked with many different technologies and programming
languages in the past, but has been particularly enjoying XQuery and Scala over
the last few years. Adam is passionate about Open Source and Open Standards. As
such he is an invited expert on the W3C XQuery Working Group and sits on the
peer-review panels of the XML Prague, Balisage, and XML London conferences. Adam also
founded the EXQuery project in early 2009,
and has since been working with the XML community and as part of the EXPath project to standardise and improve
XML application development with XQuery, XSLT and XPath.

Adam’s homepage is at http://www.adamretter.org.uk

Adam teaches in the Hands-On Introduction to XML course, the XSLT and XQuery course, and the Publishing With XML course.

Alex Milowski

Alex Milowski

Alex Milowski is a researcher and developer who has been working with markup
since 1990 and XML since its inception. He is an invited expert at the W3C and
has participated on the development of XSL FO, XSLT, XML Schema, and XProc. As a
developer, he’s produced many different XML-related technologies and open-source
projects.

With over 20 years of industry experience, he has worked at a wide range of
companies using XML technologies for commerce and publishing. In amongst those
endeavors, he has also taught XML technologies at the University of California
Berkeley’s School of Information, pursued an advanced degree in Mathematics, and
is currently working on a PhD in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

Alex teaches in the Publishing With XML course.

Dr. Andy Seaborne

Andy Seaborne

Andy has been working on the storage and query of RDF data, first as a researcher
at HPLabs, and now at Epimorphics. Andy is
continuing his participation in the SPARQL standardization process. He started
as a member of the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group and is a member of the
current W3C SPARQL Working Group. Andy co-edits the query language specification
and lead the proposal submission for SPARQL Update and is a member of the W3C
RDF Working Group.He also works on Apache Jena, an open source RDF framework for Java, where he
contributed the query engine, ensuring that complete implementations of the
standards are available, and several persistent storage sub-systems.

Andy has a PhD in Computer Science from the Computer Laboratory at the University
of Cambridge.

Andy teaches in the Semantic Technologies course.

Blaine Cook

Blaine Cook

Blaine is a BC-bred, now London-based sociotechnologist, a hacker dissatisfied by
simply building software. His long-term obsession is fostering anarchic networks
as a counter-point to the centralised systems that have come to dominate the web
over the past decade. Through numerous collaborations, he has developed
protocols and concepts that are forming the basis for many social internet
technologies yet to come. His past work as the founding architect of Twitter has
seen broad adoption both culturally and technologically. He is currently working
on a new venture to bring powerful collaborative tools to writers of the world
with his partner, author and poet Maureen Evans.

Blaine teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Florent Georges

Florent Georges

Florent Georges is the founder and CTO of H2O Consulting. He has been involved in
the XML world for 10 years, especially within the XSLT and XQuery communities.
He is an invited expert in the XSL working group at W3C. His main interests are
in the field of XSLT and XQuery extensions and libraries, packaging, unit and
functional testing, and portability between several processors. Since the
beginning of 2009, he has worked on EXPath, to define “standard” extension
function libraries that can be used in XPath (so in XSLT, XQuery and XProc as
well). Florent’s website is at http://h2oconsulting.be/.

Florent teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Graham Klyne

Graham Klyne

After obtaining a degree in Applied Mathematics, Graham Klyne has been a software
developer for many years, working on a variety of applications from scientific
measurement to industrial process control, currency trading networks to
engineering design software, and points between. Along the way, he has learned a
variety of software skills from programming early microprocessors in machine
code and C to semantic web applications in Python and Haskell. He has also
contributed to several Internet and Web standards, including the specifications
for RDF, and is currently working at Oxford University on using semantic web
technologies and more for managing research data.

Graham teaches in the Semantic Technologies course.

John Snelson

John Snelson

John Snelson is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic where he works on the Server
Development team. John has spent the last 11 years working with XML, and 9 years
working on databases like Oracle’s Berkeley DB XML and MarkLogic. He is a member
of the W3C XQuery Working Group and the W3C XSLT Working Group, and co-editor of
a number of XQuery specifications. He has worked on language implementations of
XQuery, XSLT, and most recently SPARQL, and on database transactions, indexes,
and compression.

John teaches in the Semantic Technologies course.

Kal Ahmed

Kal Ahmed

Kal Ahmed is founder of NetworkedPlanet, a software house specializing in standards-based
knowledge and content management solutions for Microsoft platforms. In previous
jobs he has worked for Xerox in XML document management systems; for Ontopia in
developing and deploying Topic Maps-based solutions; and as an independent
consultant with a focus on XML, Topic Maps and RDF.

Kal is a contributor to dotNetRDF, an
open-source platform for RDF-based applications that use the Microsoft .NET
framework; and to BrightstarDB, an
open-source RDF triple-store for .NET as well as playing around in a few other
interesting applications in linked data over on github (github.com/kal and github.com/brightstardb). What is
left of his spare time is now entirely consumed by photographing and playing roller
derby.

Kal teaches in the Semantic Technologies course.

Liam Quin

Liam Quin

Liam Quin has worked for the World Wide Web Consortium since 2001 and is the XML
Activity Lead; he is also involved in the W3C’s new Publishing initiative. He is
a co-author of the recently-published “Beginning XML 5th Edition”, and in
between consulting jobs he also runs a website mixing stock antique images with
reference books at fromoldbooks.org.

Previously, Liam worked at SoftQuad Inc., one of the leading SGML vendors, and
was heavily involved in the creation of the XML specification. He has a
background in markup and digital typography going back to the early 1980s when
he got his undergraduate degree at Warwick University.

Liam teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Dr. Libby Miller

Libby Miller

Dr Libby Miller is a Producer within the BBC’s
R&D division
. She currently works on the ViSTA-TV EU project on
the use and visualisation of real-time IPTV statistics. Before that, she led the
BBC’s part of NoTube, including work on APIs to TV for second screens,
resolution of broadcast metadata to web metadata, synchronised social
experiences, and recommendations and serendipity.

Before joining the BBC Libby worked as a product and project manager at the IPTV
company Joost, and prior to that worked on the Semantic Web, co-creating the
FOAF vocabulary and writing and implementing one of the first RDF query
languages.

She holds a PhD in Economics.

Libby teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Matt Patterson

Matt Patterson

Matt has been building for the web for over 10 years, doing everything from web
design and front-end development all the way through to back-end development. He
was one of the founding developers of the UK’s Government Digital Service, has
worked on critically-acclaimed videogames, is involved with the Rails Girls movement, coaching
aspiring developers, and has been doing a lot of work with data and
visualisation.

He’s a consultant and one of the founders of KANT Berlin.

Matt teaches in the Hands-on Web Publishing course.

Dr. Michael Kay

Michael Kay

Dr. Michael Kay is the founder and technical director of Saxonica Limited, which
develops both the open source and commercial variants of the Saxon XSLT and
XQuery processor, as well as offering XML-related consultancy services.Michael
is an invited expert on the W3C working groups developing XSLT, XQuery, and XML
Schema. In particular he is the technical lead on the XSL Working Group, which
is currently developing a new version of the language to handle streaming
transformations of large documents. He is also the author of the definitive
reference book on XSLT 2.0, and has written numerous articles and conference
papers on XSLT, XQuery, and related technologies. He is a member of the XML Guild, a group of leading independent
XML consultants, and joint winner of the XML Cup in 2005, awarded for
contributions to the XML community.

Dr. Kay spent nearly 25 years with the British computer manufacturer ICL (later
Fujitsu) where he designed and implemented a wide range of data management
software products; appointed an ICL Fellow, he was also responsible for advising
the company’s senior management and customers on technology strategy. He gained
his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge for research on database management
systems, studying under Maurice Wilkes. Michael lives in Reading, England, 25
miles down the road from Oxford.

Michael teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.

Philip Fennell

Philip Fennell

Philip Fennell is a MarkLogic Consultant who is never happier than when he’s
slaving over a pot of hot XSLT, although now he’s loving his XQuery too.
Originally trained in the printing industry, he worked as an applications
specialist, GUI designer and technical author before finding a happy home
specializing in XML and its related technologies. Since turning web developer in
2000 he has had the opportunity to work in the domains of Content Management,
Publishing, Document Processing and the Semantic Web.

Previously Philip has blogged for the O’Reilly Community http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3413 and has been involved in the
W3C’s XForms Working Group.

Philip teaches in the Semantic Technologies course.

Robin Wilton

Robin Wilton

Robin Wilton is Technical Outreach Director for Identity and Privacy, in the
Internet Society’s Trust and Identity Initiatives group. Since 2001 he has
specialised in digital identity, privacy and public policy, building a
reputation as a thought leader, communicator and translator between different
stakeholder groups.

Before joining the Internet Society Robin spent two years as a research analyst
in Gartner’s Identity and Privacy Strategies team, where – in addition to his
privacy work – he specialised in public key infrastructure, electronic
signature, single sign-on and federated identity.

Robin’s experience includes stints with IBM in systems engineering, technical
support and consulting roles; as Principal Consultant at JCP Trustbase Ltd., a
start-up specialising in Java cryptography and PKI-enabling middleware; with Sun
Microsystems in technical pre-sales and the CTO team; and as an independent
consultant on privacy and digital identity, during which time he was also
Director of Privacy and Public Policy for the Kantara Initiative.

Robin has an MA in Philosophy and Modern Languages, and is a Fellow of the
British Computer Society with Chartered IT Professional status. For more details
see http://www.internetsociety.org/who-we-are/staff/robin-wilton. This page
also supplied Robin’s photo.

Robin teaches in the Trends and Transients course.

Tomos Hillman

Tomos Hillman

Tom is a Senior Data Engineer for Oxford
University Press
.

At OUP, he is responsible for the design and maintenance of custom data models
for books and legal materials. His job role includes XML processing, supplier
documentation, and quality control systems. He also advises on digital workflows
and strategy, and writes and delivers internal training.

Tomos teaches in the Publishing With XML course.

Tony Graham

Tony Graham

Tony Graham is an independent consultant who has been working with markup since
1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSL/XSLT since 1998. He is an invited expert
on the W3C Working Group defining the XSL FO specification, an acknowledged
expert in XSLT, developer of the open source xmlroff XSL formatter, a committer
to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of “Unicode: A
Primer”, a member of the XML Guild, and a qualified trainer.

Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, and Ireland, working with data in
English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive,
publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken
about XML, XSLT, XSL FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and
conferences in North America, Europe, and Australia.

Tony teaches in the XSLT and XQuery course.